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Architecture & Design

Microservices Are (Conceptually) Too Big

Philip Willis believes that thinking about independent services and single responsibility applications rather than microservices can help to clarify the architectural trade-offs between the complexities of growing one application and those of communicating between many.

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Operations & Infrastructure

Mini-talks: The Machine Intelligence Landscape: A Venture Capital Perspective by David Beyer. The future of global, trustless transactions on the largest graph: blockchain by Olaf Carlson-Wee. Algorithms for Anti-Money Laundering by Richard Minerich.

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Enterprise Architecture

Mini-talks: The Machine Intelligence Landscape: A Venture Capital Perspective by David Beyer. The future of global, trustless transactions on the largest graph: blockchain by Olaf Carlson-Wee. Algorithms for Anti-Money Laundering by Richard Minerich.

Visual Studio Update Brings Windows XP Client Support

The delivery of Visual Studio 2012 marked the start of a more aggressive release cadence for the product line. Microsoft discussed its intent to provide more regularly scheduled updates so that VS could keep pace with the changes in the development world, and the first community technology preview (CTP) has been released to provide developers with a glimpse of the first update that is to be delivered later this year.

The changes being previewed are varied in their size and significance:

Build Applications targeting Windows XP

Support for debugging mixed managed and Native Windows Store Applications

Visual Studio integration with System Center for IntelliTrace analysis of APM exception alerts

JavaScript Memory Analysis tool which enables developers to inspect the memory usage in their Windows Store Applications written primarily in JavaScript and be able to diagnose potential leaks

Foremost among the new features is the ability to target Windows XP. Users had previously requested support for WinXP and this update will provide it. This means one executable can be deployed to WinXP, Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8 clients. Note that while this will enable the use of VS2012 tools and compiler, it does not enable support for for .NET 4.5 on WinXP. VS2012 itself still has a minimum OS requirement of Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2.

Beyond the above, the update improves testing support and makes changes to Team Foundation Server. Some of the highlights for testing include load testing and Coded UI support for SharePoint, and the ability to publish test results to TFS via the command line. As previously reported, the server file path limit will be increased to 260 characters.